Service From Google Gives Crucial Data to Ad Buyers

Wednesday

Jun 25, 2008 at 4:46 AM

Google’s new service will allow media buyers to identify sites where their display advertisements might work best, judged on criteria like demographics and traffic.

In announcing a new service for media buyers on Tuesday, Google said that its Ad Planner was meant to make life easier for the people whose job it is to identify Web sites where their clients’ messages will have the most impact.

But in the advertising world, the new service — which will be free — was seen as a fairly big missile aimed at Nielsen Online and comScore, which have been the two main competitors in this field and have until now not had to contend with a giant like Google.

Google announced Ad Planner on Tuesday through a blog post. The service will allow media buyers to identify sites where their display advertisements might work best, judged on criteria like demographics and traffic.

“We want to help you figure out where your target audience is,” Wayne Lin, business product manager for Google, said Tuesday at an advertising conference in New York.

Advertisers can use Ad Planner, which is now available in pilot form, to search for suitable sites using different filters like gender, age, education and household income. Ad Planner will tell a media buyer how many unique visitors a site attracts, its international reach and where else the site’s visitors tend to go on the Web.

In an example given on Google’s AdWords blog, visitors to ESPN.com also visited cnnsi.com, cubs.com and cbssportsline.com. Google also provides keywords that visitors use in searches — in this example, phrases like “college world series.”

Mr. Lin did not specify the source for Google’s demographic data for Ad Planner, saying that the company combined multiple data feeds and licensed information from outside sources.

One of those sources is Nielsen Online, which, along with comScore, will compete against Google’s Ad Planner. Both Nielsen and comScore charge for their services and pride themselves on the integrity of their demographic data, which is drawn from panels of volunteer Web surfers.

Susan Hickey, the head of marketing for Nielsen Online, said she still saw room in the market for her company. “Google’s an important company and an important client,” she said. “We haven’t seen, in-depth, the tool, but the breadth and depth of our data, we feel that clients pay for that.”

ComScore’s chairman, Gian M. Fulgoni, pointed to his company’s independent view as an advantage. “If I were a competitor of Google, the last thing I would want to do is use their products,” he said.

Shares of comScore dropped 22.5 percent, or $6.24, to $21.45.

Advertisers reacted with a mix of interest and wariness to the Google announcement. Roger Baron, director of media research at the advertising agency Draftfcb, said he was concerned about where Google’s demographic data was coming from but was attracted by the price.

“That’s the bold thing, that it’s free,” Mr. Baron said. “I think a lot of people will be taking a look at it.”

Kelly Andrews, director of research at Starcom MediaVest Group, said she was happy to add it to her list of tools. “Google is in a position to share more data with the industry, to the benefit of the industry,” she said.

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